Making Fun Vol. 1 available now, Roguelike Celebration this weekend

Posted by David
on September 13, 2016

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Roguelike Celebration

As a reminder, I'll be speaking at Roguelike Celebration in San Francisco this Saturday, Sept. 17. The conference begins at 9:00a and will be held at Eventbrite - 155 5th Street, 94103. Visit the event page to order tickets and see a lineup of who's speaking. The agenda is packed! It's going to be a ton of fun.

The first hour or so will be a meet-and-greet. I'll kick things off at 10a with a talk on my DUNGEON HACKS book, which chronicles the making of Rogue, Moria, Hack, and other seminal roguelike RPGs. Then, at 1030, I'll host a panel/Q&A with Michael Toy, Glenn Wichman, and Ken Arnold, the co-creators of Rogue.

Hosting a Q&A wasn't on my radar until the middle of last week, when I got an email from Glenn. He asked if I'd be willing to do it, since (to his knowledge and mine) I'm the only one who's interviewed all three of Rogue's authors individually. We're going to carve up our 30-minute block evenly between me asking them questions and taking questions from attendees.

Roguelike Celebration will be the first time I've met Glenn, Michael, and Ken face to face. I interviewed them for DUNGEON HACKS over the phone and/or Skype. I'm as thankful for the opportunity to meet these great programmers and creators as I am to share my experience writing DUNGEON HACKS.

I hope to see you at Roguelike Celebration!

MAKING FUN

Happy Book Day! MAKING FUN: STORIES OF GAME DEVELOPMENT – VOLUME 1 is available now in paperback and Kindle editions. You can find the paperback here, and the Kindle version here.

Each volume in the MAKING FUN series rounds up game-development stories I've serialized on Episodic Content or published for freelance clients within a certain timeframe. MAKING FUN V1, being the first entry, spans the largest amount of time; it has stories dating back six years! All material has been revised and—in the case of stories published with tight word/page limits—expanded to provide more insight into how certain games came to be.

I plan to publish MAKING FUN VOLUME 2 next summer/fall, with a subsequent volume following every 12-18 months thereafter. We'll see how that goes.

As is my usual approach when writing stories of game design and culture, I wrote MAKING FUN V1 in a narrative style, so that it reads like a novel. The games I cover in the book are, in order: Rebel Galaxy, Spaceteam, FTL, Demons with Shotguns, Sierra's classic King's Quest and Gabriel Knight point-and-click adventures, Donkey Kong Country, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Resident Evil 1 and its 2002 remake on GameCube, early first-person shooters (e.g., Hovertank 3-D, Doom, Duke Nukem 3D), and The Legend of Zelda series.

I hope you enjoy MAKING FUN V1. I had a ton of fun writing each of these stories, and am proud of and thrilled by how this first anthology of mine turned out.